Frozen

Some stories are too deep for tears.  Too painful to relive.  But too beautiful to bury.  Such is my story of Ricky, the cat Monty and I brought home when we’d been married for a week.  My story is simple: Ricky and I were two lost souls in need of rescue who found and saved each other.  And had the privilege of loving each other for almost eighteen years.

When Ricky died, seven years ago today, part of me died, too.  I know how that sounds to some people.  I know it might sound exaggerated or melodramatic.  I also know that people have suffered what to them is a far greater loss or a far more tragic circumstance.  And the part of my brain that is the literary critic, always so eager to chew up and spit out my own words, whispers, This might not be worth writing about.  No one will care.  Ricky was just a cat.  But my heart whispers back, I care.  Ricky was my friend.  Of all the words I could write about Ricky, those are the truest.  He was my dearest, closest friend.  He was never just a cat.

In the dark December days after Ricky died, I was nearly frozen with grief.  I was fairly new to sobriety but had never craved oblivion more.  I found solace in the words of others who’d experienced the same heartbreak.  The fact that writers I had long admired had described the loss of a pet in poignant, profound words helped me to legitimize my own grief over Ricky.  If my literary idol, Louis MacNeice, could write a four page poem about the death of his cat, then maybe my need to write about Ricky wasn’t ridiculous.  Maybe it was a way to cope.  Maybe it was a way to bring some healing to my heart.

And it has.  So have our three cats—Mackin, Seamus, and Carrick.  Mackin was our first rescue cat after Ricky.  He immediately attached himself to Monty, which was a joy for Monty but a sadness for me.   Monty knew that.  And on Valentine’s Day, two months after Ricky died, I opened the front door to Monty holding a giant cat carrier with a scrawny kitten inside.  I named him Seamus as he went straight from the carrier into my arms.  He stayed in my arms for most of the next six months.  He was very sick, and so was I.  The two of us spent most of those days curled up in pain together; on some days we were both literally fighting to breathe.  Seamus, like me, has asthma and an autoimmune disease.

But he was perfect to me.  Except in one way: he wasn’t Ricky.  And I wanted him to be.  From the day we brought Ricky home, he was my shadow.  Seamus, when he finally got stronger, bolted out of my arms and to this day only comes back when he feels like it.  I spend an enormous amount of time begging him to sit with me.  When he does, it’s either on my lap or on the cushion next to my head—his choice, not mine.  He decides if he wants to be petted or would rather try to bite off my fingers.  Ricky was a lover; Seamus is a fighter.

I can be a fighter, too, when I need to be.  And I have fought for Seamus.  For his health and for every ounce of his affection.  But until about five years ago, I didn’t realize that I hadn’t loved him with every ounce of my affection.  I didn’t realize that I’d had a wall up with Seamus, wanting desperately for him to be like Ricky and being repeatedly disappointed that he wasn’t.  On this particular night, my heart was aching with sadness over a relationship whose changes I didn’t understand.  I was missing the comfort of Ricky—he had soaked up gallons of my tears over the years.  As I was sitting there, Mackin started playing in a box that was next to me on the couch.  I got out my phone to take a video of him to show Monty.  Instead, I ended up catching the exact moment when my love story with Seamus completely changed.  I was holding my phone in one hand and petting Seamus with the other when Seamus did this:

Did you see it?  He took my hand.  And he held it.  And in that moment, I felt an actual physical shift—the wall I didn’t even know was there completely crumbled.  Any defenses I had put up to protect my heart dropped.  I looked at my hand with Seamus’s paw in it, and I saw the tattoo of Ricky on my wrist—the tattoo with a semicolon on its leg to remind me that life doesn’t have to end when it’s dark and desperate.  That the beauty of life sometimes pauses.  And it sometimes changes.  But it carries on.

Ricky taught me that.  He also taught me volumes about love and friendship.  I think this is his last lesson for me: that I can’t fully experience the beauty of the present if I’m living with one foot in the past.  It hurts too much, and it keeps me frozen—not just between Ricky and Seamus, but between what I wish I had and what I actually have.  Between the life I thought I wanted and the life God gave me instead.  Letting go of the wishes of the past and choosing to embrace the reality of the present has taken a weight off my shoulders that I didn’t even know I was carrying.  It’s opened my eyes to the joy and beauty and love that are right in front of me—today, in this moment.  In this moment, I have the life God gave me.  One of the most beautiful parts of that life is Seamus, sleeping in my lap as I write this.  He isn’t Ricky.  And I will love and miss Ricky for the rest of my life. But I have my Seamus. He’s his own perfect self.  And for me, that’s more than enough.